Advances of Remote Sensing and GIS Technology in Surface Water Bodies

Dear Colleagues, 

The rising spatial and temporal resolution of earth observations provide unprecedented opportunities for monitoring and understanding surface water bodies. Across large wetlands and multiple dispersed water bodies, remote sensing provides rising opportunities to monitor surface water variations, which can be difficult to capture by localised hydrological monitoring or modelling. Sentinel imagery notably provided a significant leap in the understanding of surface water bodies, and the arrival of SWOT planned in 2022 will provide enhanced possibilities. 

Despite these opportunities and the numerous global datasets developed from earth observations, research has also shown the limitations of these works in specific contexts. Many methods are indeed calibrated and designed to classify open water bodies, leading to omission errors on smaller water bodies, floodplains and wetlands containing large areas with flooded vegetation. In mixed water environments such as floodplains, which concentrate meanders and shallow water basins and where temporary flood patterns require high image availability, novel approaches to build upon the multiple sources of imagery are necessary. Optimal approaches to characterise long-term surface water dynamics across multiple locations must also seek to combine or fuse the observations from multiple sensors, and exploit the opportunities provided by large scale computing geoprocessing capacities. Furthermore, these approaches must be combined and confronted with ground hydrological data to increase the understanding of complex hydrological and socio-hydrological systems. 

This special issue welcomes original contributions providing novel insights to advance remote sensing of surface water bodies. Topics of interest include among others:

• surface water classification methods and accuracy considerations;
• combining and fusing earth observations from multiple sensors (radar/optical);
• increased understanding of the hydrology of selected water bodies from earth observations;
• combining and confronting earth observations with hydrological data and modelling. 

Dr. Andrew Ogilvie
Dr. Frédéric Frappart
Dr. Lisa-Maria Rebelo
Dr. Raphael Tshimanga
Guest Editors

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